Top Ten Bottom Ten
by The New Tanadra
Summary: I analyze the Top Tens and Bottom Tens of various aspects of Family Guy Fanfics. For our first episode, Tale of the Valkyrie.


**Top Ten Best and Worst Moments of Tale of the Valkyrie**

So we all know Tale of the Valkyrie. It's that rather odd fic that's been dominating the section for the last 2 and a half years. It has it's great moments, but it also has some really shitty moments. I'm here to analyze the Top Ten best and worst aspects of the story. Let's start with the best.

**Top Ten Best**

**Number Ten: Evil Jaina**

Evil Jaina was the definition of creepy. She was like a mix of Shego, Eva Braun, and that crazy girl from The Roommate. She was sadistic, cruel, and above all, desperate. She wanted God dead more than any other character, and God was fucking everybody over by the time the story ended. She was so evil that the author put it in her name for christ's sake. That also coupled with the fact that she was dead sexy. You really have to admire a sexy villian.

**Number Nine: Ignoring The Chicken Joke**

In the one chicken fight in the chapter where Stewie and Jaina get engaged, Peter comes back to find that the rest of the discussion he had left had occurred without him, with Matt pointing out that they weren't going to wait for his fight to end. It pokes fun at the fact that the characters in the show will wait for hours while Peter fights the chicken before finishing the conversation at hand. Matt points out how stupid that would be, and that they all have lives, adding that slight touch of realism that's nice to see in fanfics. This really answers the question of what the other characters do while a Big Lipped Alligator Moment is occuring.

**Number Eight: Baby Jaina**

Baby Jaina was adorable and cuddly. She was written so well. She was curious, smart-mouthed, and fascinated by the world around her. She was also somewhat of a loner. While she spent most of her time with Stewie, her thoughts and dialogue was directed at nobody in particular. She was a character like Meg, and her development became very mature as the course of the story moved on. Some of those qualities were included in her teenage form, but most of them were shunted aside to make room for more sex jokes.

**Number Seven: The Romance**

There was something about the romance in Tale of the Valkyrie, specifically between Matt/Meg and Stewie/Jaina. It was just paced so well and the couples had a real intimacy between them. A lot of Bhaal's romantic scenes really touched my heart and made the romance really believable. In the case of Stewie/Jaina, it really did well looking at both sides of the incest argument, and stayed ambigious as long as it could. And even better, when it lost it's ambiguity, Bhaal ended it. If Bhaal is this good at romance, imagine how lucky his girlfriend must be?

**Number Six: Mary Sue Jokes**

What kept Matt from becoming a Mary Sue were two things. The first was his submission to Meg's will, the second was the jokes. At the start of the story, Matt's Mary Sue Score was around 80-110. By the end of the story, it had reached the 50,000,000 range. Matt often manipulated this to perform classic Mary Sue moves like changing the laws of physics or understanding other languages. This did not go unnoticed by the other characters, Meg and Jaina commenting on it the most. Some of the jokes were really funny, while others were hysterical. Matt was also often punished for his misuse of the ability.

**Number Five: The Action Scenes**

There's something about dramatic action that Bhaal really understands. Every move and action is described fully and goes into enormous detail. It's almost as if Bhaal was born to write people fighting. The fights flow so well and some even mesh music into the scene (nearly impossible when you're writing text) and great care is taken during the writing process.

**Number Four: The Dialogue**

The dialogue is superb. The way the characters speak and interact is not only akin to how real people interact, but it's been polished to a mirror shine. Part of the thing that takes Bhaal so long to write a chapter (and me even longer to edit it) must be that he spends hours thinking of just the right thing for the characters to say in his chapters.

**Number Three: God As The Villian**

When most people think of God, do you really think of it as the role of the bad guy? Well obviously Bhaal does, and God is a really believable bad guy. She's insecure, desperate for power in a world where faith is waning, and having to butt heads with her own creation that's become more powerful than her. She is jealous of, not only Matt's power, but also of the family he has to support him. Even better was that God is strong enough to take down Matt no matter how powerful he gets, but she is easily killed by the mistake of ignoring the people on the sidelines.

This perhaps flies in the face of other stories (The Spellbook in particular) where the support cast stays to the back and never interferes while two characters are duelling.

**Number Two: Matt**

Matt is unlike any protagonist anyone has ever seen. Despite everything that's happened to him, he's never lost his charm and humor throughout the entire story. And Matt also shows that he can be an arrogant jerk sometimes. In fact, the entire main plot was devoted to Matt's struggle with his inner evil. He was both the hero and the villian, battling with what it was he wanted to be, and that made us root for him even more. When a character is faced with a difficult decision in their life, it's the author's chance to show who they really are as a person. And Matt, in his injured breaths, trying to push Jaina's healing hands away from him is enough to water the eyes of even the most stoic cynic.

**Number One: Meg**

Despite the plot centering around Matt, Bhaal really managed to develop Meg into a very impressive character. More importantly, she evolved very well as the story moved on. She started out scared and beaten down, but as the story moved on and she was exposed to more dangerous things and learned more about herself, she became condident and even heroic. Christ, at the end of the story, Meg becomes God, which I'm sure took a lot of people by surprise. I was sure Matt was going to be God. But she manages to save Matt from evil, re-teach him his powers, and even strikes the deathblow to the most powerful being in the universe. Seriously, Meg kicks ass in this story.

Well that was fun, but that's not what you came here for. Let's look at the WORST things about Tale of the Valkyrie.

**Top Ten Worst**

Like all stories, Tale of the Valkyrie had it's bad moments. Unlike other stories, the bad moments were REALLY bad. And choosing the top ten worst moments was easy, as these moments were the most critisized, the most hated, and the biggest let-downs from an overall good story. Here goes the Top Ten Worst Moments of Tale of the Valkyrie.

**Number Ten: Teen Jaina**

After the Time Skip, Bhaal dropped Jaina's inquisitive personality and adorable clinginess for shallow sex appeal. But did it really appeal to anybody? We knew Jaina from when she was a baby. We had grown to love her personality, and simply making her lose her clothing every few lines wasn't going to change that. I'm tempted to believe that this was an in-joke at the shallow sex appeal of modern media, but if it was, it would have been better executed by using a character the audience wasn't already attached to on an emotional level. While Jaina had a few mildly incesteous moments in her childhood, they were severely overblown in her teen years. Now, to be fair, Jaina retained her childlike innocence to a certain degree. She was still a daddy's girl, she was curious about the world around her, and sometimes managed to act like a real Meg's Daughter, but most of her teenage characterisitics ruined her character. And most hardcore fans of the story retain that Baby Jaina and Teen Jaina are two different people altogether.

**Number Nine: The Copy-Pasta**

There were a few scenes from episodes (as well as a few episodes entirely) that were a direct copy-paste of a pop-culture meme or TV episode. _Need For Speed _was a prime example. This was copied from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and was a pretty weak chapter anyway. Another example was _I'm A Kid_, but surprisingly, when I mentioned to Bhaal that he had copied Recess, he actually asked me "What's Recess? Is that a movie?" In the case of _I'm a Kid_ I really believe that he had no idea what he was copying.

In _A Symphony of Frost and Flame _Part 1, much of the dialogue between Matt and Jac rips off Revenge of the Sith. And Star Wars dialogue never quotes well because all the star wars movies are really badly written anyway. Family Guy fanfics can get away with this to a certain degree, and while it doesn't show up very often, when it does it's painful to read.

**Number Eight: Shadow's Prey is a Good Guy?**

In _A Symphony of Frost and Flame_, Part 2, it was revealed that Shadow's Prey was a good guy all along. What the fuck kind of twist is this? It's also hinted through his dialogue that he's the fucking devil! You can't turn around and just reveal that your main villian is the good guy. It needs to have more subtlety than that! There needs to be suspicion, a change of heart, or at the very least some real writing behind it. This all takes place within a single apragraph, and Matt just sits there and accepts it. If the person you'd been fighting tooth and nail with for almost two decades just said "Hey guess what, I'm the good guy" would you really accept that as truth? No, You'd say "Bullshit" and punch him in the eye.

Did Bhaal just forget what SP's personality was? This was the guy who tried to have Meg killed and tried to murder billions of people. How the hell is this a good guy? What, is Bhaal just a Nazi sympathizer?

**Number Seven: The Twilight Jokes**

Now Twilight jokes are always funny. Making fun of popular things always is. But there is such a thing as too much. When the first chapter did it, I thought it was pretty interesting. The series was just becoming popular and getting terrible reviews from critics. When he kept doing it, the jokes were getting stale and not as creative, but still laughable. But by the time the final chapter did it, the jokes didn't even have any substance anymore. When Bhaal finds a joke he likes, it's hard to get him to let go of it. After he saw Black Swan he kept asking me if my breath was fresh. First time, funny. Second time, annoying. Third time, shut the fuck up already!

**Number Six: Riko**

What was the point of this character? I assume it was to be a crazy, bloodthirsty killer, but we already had Evil Jaina for that. She showed up for a few scenes and then died. Sort of like Bellatrix Lestrange, she was completley attached to her master. My guess is that after Evil Jaina turned to the good side, Bhaal needed another crazy, demented villianess to fill her shoes. But this character was devoid of all subtlety. The only good thing about the character was that it gave Meg the most badass line in the entire story (keep your lips off my husband *stab in the chest*) but aside from that, she was unnessecary.

**Number Five: Personality Took a Backseat to the Message**

A number of chapters (Jaina's Innocence being a key offender) had an underlying message that Bhaal was determined to get out no matter what. As a result, he often ripped apart an established character's personality in order to do it. Stewie was the victim of this most times. He flitted schitzophrenicly back and forth between being in character and being Jaina's doting lover just to deliver the "Incest Isn't Wrong" message. Meg had this happen to her once, where she became an unfeeling bitch just to give Jaina something to oppose. I'm guessing this was supposed to make Jaina asking for her child's grandmother seem more dramatic, but overall it came across as preachy and thick.

**Number Four: The Blend of Religion and Fantasy**

Don't get me wrong, I think trying to blend religion and fantasy is an interesting thing. But the way Bhaal went about it was really weird. So, God is really Athena who is watched over by the Val'Kyr from World of Warcraft who are under the command of Solar from Baldur's Gate 2 who thirst for battle like Klingons and have their plans foiled by a small band of heroes like a JRPG? And I guess you become God by killing the old one this story.

The story goes that a long time ago, the Gods realised that they were dying, and began to set their affairs in order. However, Athena (the Godess of Wisdom) fought fate and created three religions to keep herself alive through their faith (and we don't have to look far to realize which religions they were). But as the faith began to wane, Athena became more and more desperate, slowly slipping into madness. Eventually, she had to be stopped. Solar asked Odin to send a number of Val'Kyr to watch her and put an end to her if they had to. But Athena promised them battle, and they turned. Eventually, Matt (being the only Val'Kyr by title alone) had to stop her with the help of Meg and Jaina.

My guess is that nobody had ever tried to make an interesting fantasy story, using various religions as a base for your lore. So being the first person to attempt it has to be given some credit, but really? Just the way it was introduced was given no exposition and no substance to make an interesting narrative.

**Number Three: The Inconsistent Personalities**

Like with the Copy-Pasta, this one didn't happen very often. But when it did, it was really over the top. In Jaina's Innocence, Meg switched from a caring mother to a hateful bitch without so much as a "how do ya do". This mirrored how her mother acted earlier in the story, but even that wasn't done very well. Matt's personality also shifted on occasion from a responsible, reasonable straight man to a favoring parent with anger issues. No one character had a single personality. I think Bhaal was going for complex traits in his characters, but it just wan't executed very well. Every character was really three or four characters all fighting to get out into the open. As a result, they just seemed bland and uninteresting.

**Number Two: Jaina's Sacrifice**

Where do I begin? So it turned out that Jaina was born by harbouring Matt's soul in her body. So after our first Harry Potter reference we realise that Jaina has to sing a special lament to return his soul and heal his wounds. Tangled reference. The song she sings is Illumination, by Globus. Let me dwell on this for a moment by saying that the song choice was really good. The first couple of lines of each verse were really well chosen, and speaking as someone who listened to the song as I read it, it fit the tone excellently.

But the problems start here. Jaina gave her life so Matt would have the strength to kill Athena. But Athena was able to defeat him with no problem whatsoever. It wasn't even effort for her. If so, why was Matt able to kick her ass at the start of the story, and at the end of the first arc so easily? And if Athena was able to overpower him so quickly, that makes Jaina's sacrifice in vain. Furthermore, there is no death scene where she says anything, she just dies instantly. Not the best way to take our your most popular character. Thirdly, Matt and Meg don't really mourn her death. They kind of just shrug their shoulders and move on. You would think that Matt would be devastated, Jaina is the most important thing in the world to him.

Bhaal said he was tired of the story and wanted to end it as quickly as possible. But in his haste, he neglected what could have been a touching ending. There is nothing positive about this scene, and the ones that follow. Jaina sacrificing herself to no effect or even mourning comes across as the author being sadistic and hateful.

**Number One: It Just Dragged On**

Running a religious fantasy story as a virtual season was not the way to go. It would have done better if it were like Whispering Illusion and a continious story with a single plot. The story ran on for almost 70 chapters and about half of them weren't any good. If Bhaal had stuck to his strengths and not tried to be as popular as Meg's Family or The Spellbook, his story would have been better for it. He could have gotten a really good story out in 20 chapters if he'd done that. There certainly wasn't enough exposition in the story, and Bhaal never explained anything that happened outside of his comments in the forums. But there was simply too much sitcom moments for a religious fantasy and there should have been a bigger focus on the overarching plot.

Mind you, the overarching plot is it's strongest point, one that other authors are learning from. But the tangled mess of all the plot holes, storylines that were abandoned, and missing character traits made it not very memorable. Most of the abandoned chapter ideas seemed to be the strongest of all at first glance. But as a Virtual Season, TotV was perhaps not the kind of story that could survive the format.

Mind you, for all it's flaws, Tale of the Valkyrie is still an interesting read. It's certainly unique to it's kind with nothing else like it on the site. But it's important to remember that all stories have fatal flaws. Even the ones that seem to be good overall have a lot of things bad about them. This is what you get on fanfiction. A few winners, a whole lot of losers.


End file.
